- Paperback: 212 pages
- Publisher: Penguin Books; Reissue edition (Aug 2001)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0141002018
- ISBN-13: 978-0141002019
- Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 12.7 x 1.5 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 3,079,565 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
On a squally afternoon in the winter of 1821, Sarah Dyer gives birth to the strangest child ever seen in Tasmania, a thing more seal than human. The pup is a joy to its parents and a welcome companion to their nine-year-old son, Ned, who discovers surprising and profitable talents in his whiskery brother. But when a well-dressed stranger arrives bearing a modest proposal for the infant's future, no one forsees the trouble that lies ahead. A fantastical story in the tradition of Peter Carey, roundly praised by the critics and already an international bestseller.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
About the Author
Tom Gilling was born in Norwich in 1961 and emigrated to Australia in 1983. His journalism has appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, the Australian, the Bulletin and Rolling Stone. He lives in Sydney and The Sooterkin is his first novel.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
Format:Paperback
Set in Tasmania, Tom Gilling's ludicrous fiction The Sooterkin describes how Sarah Dyer was delivered of a monstrous seal-pup child in 1821. The novel presents a variety of comic responses to the event from an array of characters and caricatures who people the whaling town of Hobart. The place itself is rendered in its grotesque physical reality: blood, guts, mud, and `rancid with blubber'. It's reminiscent of the primeval mud of the Nile, which according to the ancient writer, Pliny, breeds monsters. The land is marked by manifest signs of the colonised but these vanish into the undifferentiated as soon as the agents of `culture' stray too far beyond the town. The Chaplain, Mr Kidney, finds that the country `seems primordial, uncouth, devoid of any human presence save his own.' The darkness seems to `conjure disembodied noises' (121) and he feels finally `taunted by a monstrosity that science and the Bible have been unable to explain.' (183). The story parallels then, the conjoined history, one of a monstrous birth, the other the `birth' of Austrlia. Both are essentially unreadable, despite competing theories. Crimes, like Mrs Jakes' unnamed abortions (`a parcel the size of a cauliflower' (184), lie buried in the ground. `He didn't ask what she was doing and he never said.' (184). I have taught this book as part of a second-year University course on the gothic and the grotesque and can confirm that it was well-received by the majority of students. A minority of readers were irritated by the fantastic elements of the plot - though these are not materially significant and are easily exaggerated. There was a lively debate on the allegorical features of the novel: to what extent is the story a version of Australian history as a grotesque narrative of monstrous births and colonisers' discourses?
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
In The Sooterkin, Tom Gilling has chosen his words so carefully that there is no need for superfluous padding, so this is not a book that will take days to trudge through. Every sentence is a masterpiece of concise observation, making the characters and their surroundings vivid and believable.
The mud-swamped, drink-saturated world of early 19th-century Tasmania's convict community forms the backdrop to a boisterous, off-the-wall tale filled with memorable people and irreverent humour. While the plot itself is entertaining, I found that it was Gilling's remarkable (and sometimes lavatorial) turn of phrase that really got me laughing.
Without ever saying a word, the "Sooterkin" of the title soon becomes someone for the reader to root for, while nine-year-old Ned's combination of wily courage and loyalty to his brother makes him equally sympathetic. Although most of the characters are unsavoury, Gilling has a nack of making you care about what happens to them.
The plot is straightforward, without unexpected twists; it is the use of language that sets this book a class ahead of so many others. It reminds me a little of Jim Dodge's bizarre novelette "Fup" - but even funnier. The conclusion is not too difficult to anticipate, but is perhaps the more poignant for that. "Happy-sad" though it might be, the ending is accomplished without sentimentality, and rounds off one of the most enjoyable and well-written books I have read for a long time.
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This well written book is startling and just plain fun to read. There are not many other authors who would dare to begin with the opening sentence, "Pardon the stench," then go on to describe in graphic horror the slaughter of the whales in Hobart Town, while chastising you for not arriving sooner, "when you would have smelt eucalyptus blossom and lavender." Obviously playing with the reader from the opening page, Gilling is so entertaining with his story that the reader plays along, too, delightedly participating in this wild, carnival experience.
When a strange, seal-like offspring is "born" to a former convict woman in Van Dieman's Land, now Tasmania, everyone gets in on the action. Thought by some residents to be a sooterkin, a kind of goblin, we see that the creature, "Arthur," is a brother to Ned, a meal ticket for his larcenous mother, who sells peeks at him, and a source of much curiosity to the townspeople. Poking fun at everyone's views of reality, Gilling here satirizes all levels of Tasmanian society, from the local pamphleteer, who declares that if it looks like a seal and acts like a seal that it is a seal, to the Reverend Kidney, who tries to find a place for it in the theological chain of being. And since we readers do not know, for sure, exactly what the creature is, we become willing and amused participants in the author's greatest joke of all--on us.
In prose that is perfectly suited to his broad but light-hearted satire, Gilling keeps the reader constantly entertained with his terse descriptions and ironic detachment. To the question of what it is like to be kissed by a seal pup, for example, he answers tersely, "It's like nuzzling tripe. Or blowing your nose on a stinging nettle." A short novel with bold and offbeat humor, startling imagery, and unforgettable action scenes, Sooterkin will amuse those looking for a literary change of pace. Mary Whipple
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